six demon bag

Back in college, one of my software engineering classes was a project to develop a simple 3D engine without resorting to existing 3D routines. The implementation of my group was done in Java, because that way it was rather easy to implement the GUI, and the requirements were simple enough to be met by contemporary hardware. It's probably not really helpful to anyone, but it was fun to do, so I'm posting it anyway.

Sometimes administrators need to access the computer of a remote user, but depending on the location (e.g. hotels or foreign company networks) NAT or firewalls may get in the way. One method of getting around this problem is to establish an outbound SSH tunnel on the remote user's computer, and then connect back to the computer through that tunnel. However, setting up an SSH tunnel isn't something Joe Average usually is too comfortable with. That's why I wrote wormhole, a little application (actually a shell script encapsulated in an application bundle via Platypus) to make establishing a tunnel as simple as possible for remote Macintosh users.

A great deal of Windows software requires to be run with administrative or at least power user privileges for no good reason. That's a Bad Thing™, because it enables any user to compromise the system. Most of this software can, however, be talked into running with a normal user's privileges. The problem is usually that the program attempts to write temporary data, configuration data and other stuff like that to places a normal user can't write to. In this article I will describe the procedure I usually apply when having to deal with reluctant software.